Tag Archives: Ivan Chtcheglov

This has been my favourite of all of the works that poured from the pens of lettrists and situationists and all the -ists of the place and period. These quotes are drawn from the translation of tom mcdonaugh’s the situationists and the city, which was for the most part a truly inspired collection, and wonderful to read in rapid succession to The Beach Beneath the Streets. Nice to see Mike Davis there in the acknowledgments as well, for his inspiration and encouragement of the project.

I intend to find out more of Ivan Chtcheglov — or Gilles Ivain, but these are my favourite bits from ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ from the Internationale situationniste no 1 (June 1958). I love the opening:

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any temple of the sun. Between the legs of women walking by the Dadaists would have liked to find an adjustable wrench, and the Surrealists a crystal goblet–that’s lost.

I think of Aragon and Breton, all that is missing from their work, I somehow love this first sentence. It gets better from there:

All cities are geological and three steps cannot be taken without encountering ghosts, bearing all the prestige of their legends. We maneuver within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of folkloric tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, Mammoth Cave, mirrors of Casinos. (33-35)

It is not often I love the complicated and baroque, the privilege of boredom, but I swooned a little over cities geological. Realised much of what I seek in my rambles through the city are indeed the original conceptions of space (though more than that, how they lead you to a taste the original experiences, because how else can you feel the weight of past lives lived in dialectical relation to such spaces?).

Then on to architecture and all it can be, all it can do:

Architecture is the simplest means to articulate time and space, to modulate reality, to engender dreams. It is not only a matter of plastic articulation and modulation–expression of an ephemeral beauty–but of a modulation producing influences, in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and progress in the realization of those desires. (36)

and this:

I will quickly recall the bases of architecture:
– a new conception of space (whether based on a religious cosmogony or not).
– a new conception of time (numeration starting from zero, various ways for time to unfold).
– a new conception of comportment (in moral nature, sociology, politics, law. the economy is only one part of the laws of comportment to which a civilization agrees). (36)

In thinking about what most modern architecture provides us in terms of new conceptions of space, time and comportment, I despair. My walks up and down the Thames (and any river in any city) reveal all the terrible truth of the following statement, particularly in regards to the construction of new luxury development, new ‘public’ but always mostly privatised space:

A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. (36)

We quarrel, however, Chtcheglov and I, over the possible cure. Still, he is delightfully inventive:

The ideal city would be built in quarters — the Bizarre Querter, Happy Quarter, Noble and Tragic Quarter, and perhaps also a Death Quarter, not for dying in but in which to live in peace, and here I think of Mexico and a principle of innocent cruelty that becomes dearer to me each day. (40)

A bit confusing and a little patronising, this innocent cruelty, but I will let it go…

We move into city as process, as activity, as the building of the collective and the need for the spiritual aspect of life in its fulness:

The principle activity of the inhabitants will be CONTINUOUS DÉRIVE. The changing landscape from one hour to the next will result in complete disorientation. (40)

…a people cannot live on dérive alone…Experience demonstrates that a dérive favourably replaces a mass; it is better fitted to introduce the whole of our energies into communication, to collect them for the benefit of the collectivity. (41)

It seems to me this presents insight after insight in vibrant language and then leaves you alone to think about it. I much prefer it to Debord, but Chtcheglov was removed from these intellectual debates through institutionalisation, which breaks my heart a little. McKenzie Wark writes:

After he was institutionalized, Chtcheglov would write Debord and Bernstein from the sanatorium explaining that the dérive has its limits, and cannot be practiced continually. “It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us. Iron infected our blood.”3 To even propose a new architecture for a new way of life took more resources than they possessed. The complete renunciation of what one might now call middle-class life cut them off from vital resources. (146) (from Beach Beneath a Street)

There is little more about Gilles Ivain here, or elsewhere that focuses on the situationists. The toll of mental illness and the lack of sympathy and understanding perhaps, alongside the toll of intellectual inquiry and the struggle for change.

Here they take on the urbanists, insults from Constant in ‘Unitary Urbanism’ a lecture from 1960:

The failure of modern urbanists can be attributed to their opportunism, their passive attitude to the problems confronting them, their uncritical deference to an obsolete cultural convention, to the existing image of society. What nowadays counts for urbanism confines itself to the more or less aesthetic solution of current socio-economic problems; for the most part housing and traffic problems. For pragmatic reasons, that is for the sake of a quick provisional solution, urbanists isolate these problems from the totality of social life, they see them as detached from the cultural issue. (112)

Here is the proof that today’s urbanists are indeed to blame for the failure of the modern city as a human habitat, for the disappearance of a social space in which a new culture could arise. (113)

Then there are the existentialist digs — Sartre, Camus and Simone de Beauvoir among others lived on Saint-Germain-des-Prés, frequented the two cafes there, Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots. Hemingway and Picasso hung out there too, but maybe not together. These cafés became centres of tourism where Americans waited anxiously for wisdom to fall into their laps (only the coolest people know that Baldwin also wrote much of Go Tell It on the Mountain here).

A certain Saint-Germain-des-Prés, on which no one has yet written a word, was the first unit working at the scale of history on this ethics of dérive. This egregore, secret until now, is the lone explanation for the enormous influence that three blocks of houses have exerted over the world, and that people have tried to rationalize through the insufficient fields of clothing and song, and more stupidly through questionable aptitudes for prostitution… (Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov) Internationale situationniste no 1 (June 1958), p 41)

But the very best are reserved for Le Corbusier, they are delicious:

The modulor Protestant, Le Corbusier-Sing-Sing, the dauber of neo-Cubist smears, is making the “machine for living in” work for the greater glory of God, who created carrion and crows [corbusiers] in his own image
‘Skyscrapers by the Roots, Lettrist International, Potlatch no. 5, July 20, 1954 (p44)

and this:

We leave to monsieur Le Corbusier his style that suits factories as well as it does hospitals. And the prisons of the future: is he not already building churches? I do not know what this individual–ugly of countenance and hideous in his conceptions of the world–is repressing to make him want thus to crush humanity under ignoble heaps of reinforced concrete, a noble material that ought to permit an aerial articulation of space superior to Flamboyant Gothic. His power of cretinization is vast. A model by Corbusier is the only image that brings to my mind the idea of immediate suicide. With him moreover and remaining joy will fade. And love–passion–liberty. (35)
‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov) Internationale situationniste no 1 (June 1958)

You realise Debord is actually the least exciting of insult-writers:

Since Le Corbusier has made of his work an illustration of and a powerful means of action for the worst oppressive forces, this work–certain of whose lessons should however be incorporated into the next phase–is promised a complete bankruptcy.
Statement by Lettrist International Delegate to the Alba Congress – Guy Debord (92)

There are more, but I tired of the exercise…

[these translations from the wonderful compilation by Mcdonough, Tom. (2009) the situationists and the city. London, NY: Verso.]

We were only there for a few days and I quite loved it. It is such a graceful and liveable city, at least in the centre. Everyone walks so much slower there. You spend time in the sidewalk cafes, in the restaurants, in the bars. No one is in a hurry. The food is good, and so is the wine. Flowers line the wrought-iron balconies. Bookshops are everywhere. Style abounds. My god, the cheese alone is a wonder. You look at some of those everyday apartment buildings, and in comparison to the new insanely expensive glass-and-steel development mushrooming along the Thames, you think to yourself that those are really what is meant by luxury flats.

None of the new abominations that hurt my soul are to be found here in the centre. None at all.

I think it is because they (in particular Haussman) have bulldozed the mystery.

The poor were moved out to the banlieues, places that seem designed to contain and suppress their energies. We didn’t make it out to them, it felt too voyeuristic somehow. Yet I confess in most cities I have lived in, our neighbourhoods are best for a little crazy colour, street vendors, rich smells of food, music, people chilling outside, general chaos.

And the built environment? Of course, I say to myself, of course it produced the Situationists. The yearning for alleys and corners and contrasts and wonder. Because most of that is gone.

a labyrinth of obscure, crooked, and narrow streets, which extend from the Palais de Justice to Nôtre Dame.

Those teetering stairways so steep you needed a rope to climb them, those shacks and tenements and drinking dens of thieves have been converted to this:

I am not a fan of slums, no, but this is built for cars and the control of people. Stories of romance and adventure are impossible here.

Revolution has been erased, under the statue/entrance to the metro was once the guillotine and the Terror, unsigned:

In the Rue Transnonain barricades were thrown up during a worker’s uprising between 13-14 April, 1834 and twelve people were murdered by soldiers in response. It was intentionally erased to create a newer, wider boulevard. All of these wide and straight boulevards with their uniform buildings were created to prevent barricades, to allow soldiers and police the ability to steamroll across uprising, and to prevent escape or any cover of darkness. All that remains is one sign:

It is no longer a site of pilgrimage and memory, apart from this remaining street name chiseled into an old wall, all that remains is this telling depiction by Daumier, down to the dead child:

Daumier himself, one of my favourite artists who ruthlessly chronicled abuse of power and privilege, is rarely mentioned, has no museum or home or collection to remember him by that I could find.

The Paris Commune took their last stand in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Where soldiers shot dead over a hundred people, we found a simple plaque:

Simple is all right (facing it is the grave of the Lafargue’s, Marx’s daughter Laura and her husband who committed suicide in old age so as not to be a burden on the movement. Tragic in every sense). But let us compare it to the two massive monuments here to the soldiers who lost their lives putting down their own people, part of the force that shot those 100 of our comrades dead:

There can be no doubt of the politics of value here.

There are luckily still hints of past strangeness, another in the same cemetery (a wonderland of beloved figures to pay your respects to actually, more on that soon):

But it is the tomb of a Scot, well, someone descended from a Scot at least, name of Robertson. My sister in law’s family probably.

All this probably underlines the connections between the urban the cultural the political. Returning to Chtcheglov, he writes:

All cities are geological and three steps cannot be taken without encountering ghosts, bearing all the prestige of their legends.

Paris has done its best to erase the ghosts. You have to know your history to feel their absence.

It should not be forgotten that modern Urbanism has not yet been an art–and even less a setting for life–it has on the other hand always been inspired by Police directives; and after all Haussman only gave us these boulevards to more conveniently bring in the cannon (Lettrist International, Potlatch no. 5).

There was one curiosity, tied in to Police directives:

Perhaps this disturbing old bar sign also, it needs returning to in another post in terms of race and colonial politics. It sits alongside one of the older buildings sprinkled here and there, bringing relief when you find them:

A handful of stories that could be told:

or

or

We found the medieval home of Nicholas Flamel of philosopher’s stone fame, but were unable to face another meal:

We found a few remnants of the arcades so loved by Aragon and Benjamin, vilified slightly by Zola, all of them feeling like well-preserved leftovers and decidedly private — thus very closed on a Sunday.

Passage Vero Dodat seems quite magical despite that (and it is here that the police stumbled across Daumier’s print of the massacre at Rue Transnonain, which led to six months in prison for him):

But Passage Choiseul feels like nothing more than a mall really (and I thought to myself, Cardiff’s arcades are so much better…)

Even the sewers are memorialised and opened to public gaze in guided safety for a fee, in the most banal of surroundings:

Shut when I dragged Mark to see them despite all misgivings. Sadness.

Almost all surprise, strangeness, wonder is brought to Parisian streets by lively art, détournements everywhere both playful and clever. There is Paris under the sea, and more to come. There is much to love, especially the way that people live and play in public space, and I’ll explore that too.

While there are still some narrow winding streets to lose yourself in, always you find yourself back in broad boulevards of a sameness and the mystery is mostly gone. They couldn’t kill it entirely, it is too strong for that, but they have tried.